Ramírez de la Piscina. En el corazón de la Sonsierra

Cecilio Ramírez de la Piscina resolutely explains the origins of his family winery in San Vicente de la Sonsierra. In order to understand the context, we must look at Rioja in the 1950s and 1960s. An appellation with little more than two dozen producers ageing and selling wine and hundreds of grape growing families (cosecheros) who made wine for self-consumption and sold it in bulk to the historic bodegas in the area. Some of these cosecheros filled demijohns with their young wines which they later sold in neighbouring markets, particularly in the Basque Country.

One of them was Julio Ramírez de la Piscina. Born in Ábalos in a family of millers, Julio worked the land and was the father of Cecilio and Pilar, the two siblings who now run the winery after the early death of Julio jr, their brother. Known as ‘el Riojano’, Julio, the patriarch, opened up a small store to sell his wines in the San Francisco district in Bilbao in 1961. “His early success spurred him to deliver wine with a motorbike and a trolley around the bars in his neighborhood and later to the rest of Bilbao,” remembers Cecilio.

In the mid 1980s, siblings Cecilio, Pilar and Julio took over the business. They built a winery next to the original family bodega, constructed by their maternal grandfather in San Vicente in the 1930s. They started to bottle Rioja wine under the brand Ramírez de la Piscina, the family surname, with grapes sourced from their own vineyards in Ábalos and from other growers in the Sonsierra. The critics’ good ratings helped them to export their first bottles to the US in 1990.

Their current bodega in San Vicente dates from 2001 and was built to handle close to 600,000 bottles. Their range of wines includes several categories: carbonic maceration (young) wines, Crianza, Reserva and Gran Reserva (with destemmed grapes). “I always liked life in the bodega even though I graduated in Chemistry at the university in Bilbao and my first working experience was in graphic arts,” recalls Cecilio. The new generation —Pilar’s children— has joined this saga, whose family name is linked to Santa María de la Piscina, a spectacular Romanesque church in San Vicente.

As well as the traditional range of Rioja classics, Ramírez de la Piscina makes two well-regarded wines labelled as Selection —a Crianza and a Reserva with the oldest vines in the estate which are aged in American and French oak barrels. “They have been the official wines of Rioja’s Control Board in four of the last five years,” explains Cecilio. The family welcomes visitors to their bodega on weekdays and weekends with prior appointment.

The quality of their wines has been recognized in numerous international competitions as well as by world-acclaimed experts.